This invention relates to transmitting an image via a fading communication channel to provide at the receiver an image of good perceptual quality despite the impaired channel. This invention relates further to transmitting both uncompressed and compressed images under like circumstances.
Techniques have been proposed for transmitting images over wireless channels by compressing images with the discrete cosine transform (DCT) or the wavelet transform. These techniques can be divided into four categories: (1) detecting and correcting errors, (2) coding images to be error-resilient, (3) concealing errors, and (4) hybrid techniques. Category 1 techniques combat the errors introduced during wireless transmission through automatic repeat requests (ARQs) or through error coding. Category 2 techniques make the transmitted data stream less sensitive to wireless channel errors. Thus, when the data arrives at the receiver, it can be recovered from errors in the bit stream. Category 3 techniques attempt to hide errors that degrade the perceptual quality of the image after it has been received. Category 4 techniques combine the techniques of categories 1-3.
Diversity is a communication technique that improves wireless transmission by using highly uncorrelated signal paths to combat channel noise. Diversity techniques include spatial-, frequency-, and time-diversity. In all of these, multiple uncorrelated signals are combined at the receiver to generate the information. Selection diversity is one simple example of diversity combining that takes the signal from the diversity branch with the highest SNR. Other common techniques for diversity combining are equal-gain and maximal-ratio. All of these techniques carry out diversity combining in the data domain; they attempt to obtain the best estimate of the received digital data.